Done 'googling' your ex? Now 'zillow' your neighbor

The U.S. housing market may be cooling off, but the nation's obsession with real estate shows no signs of abating.

Just as spurned lovers use Google to monitor the ex, real-estate fanatics are tapping into new Web sites that tell them instantly what friends, neighbors and co-workers paid for their houses.

As the sites gain traffic, home-price voyeurism is reaching new heights. In arming the nosy with a key financial metric, these sites are pulling back the curtain on one of the last private aspects of American life.

Earlier this year, realestateabc.com and zillow.com started providing free access to historical purchase prices, estimates of current values, square-footage and aerial images of houses across the country. (It's even spawned a new verb: to "zillow" your neighbors.)

The information, available for tens of millions of homes, comes from government records and other suppliers of public data, with estimates of a home's current values coming from the sites' own calculations.

To get started, you need nothing more than a property's address.

With the new tools, consumers are going on a snooping spree. Philip Koss says he has keyed in his own home, searched friends' places--even zillowed his boss.

Recently, after receiving an invitation to dinner at the new home of some friends, the 32-year-old architect in Pasadena, Calif., and his wife searched that address too.

Before dinner, as the friends showed off their small fixer-upper, Koss and his wife struggled to contain their disbelief.

After the tour, his wife leaned over to confide: "I can't believe they paid $780,000 for this thing."

Americans have always had a healthy interest in what the next guy paid for his house.

But traditionally only determined busybodies went to the lengths required to find the information--chatting up loose-lipped real-estate agents, tracking down tax records filed in dusty corners of government offices, using fee-based services or consulting often-unwieldy county and state Web sites.

The new home-price searches serve as the latest example of how the Internet has enabled Americans' inner snoops. The Web site fundrace.org, for example, created a stir when it began letting consumers easily check on the campaign contributions of neighbors during the last presidential election.